AT THE END of 1980 the members of President-elect Ronald Reagan’s transition team unanimously believed there should be more covert action. William J. Casey, Reagan’s 1980 campaign manager and his choice for CIA director, accepted this position though he largely ignored the transition report. The new director, a friend of the president and member of Reagan’s informal “kitchen cabinet,” made no bones about offering policy advice; by all indications, he rather enjoyed the role. Casey and Reagan were a close team. No director of central intelligence—except George J. Tenet in later years—ever spent more time with a president than Casey. Ronald Reagan saw his DCI as a loyal, tough, and competent adviser and an effective agent. Reagan appreciated Casey’s political work and his personal achievements.
A Wall Street lawyer, Casey had grown wealthy on investments and from dispensing tax advice. An amateur historian, sometime president of the Export-Import Bank, and chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Casey had also been one of the original secret warriors. In World War II he went into the Office of Strategic Services where he worked as an aide to Wild Bill Donovan. The OSS chief, in turn, sent Casey to London. There the acolyte helped organize the Jedburgh Program. In December 1944 Casey replaced David Bruce as OSS chief of secret intelligence for the European theater. He supervised the infiltration of OSS agents into Germany during the last days of the Third Reich. After the war Casey remained active in OSS veterans’ associations and was appointed to the PFIAB by President Gerald Ford. To a newly elected Ronald Reagan looking for a CIA director, Bill Casey must have seemed a natural. Casey himself had wanted to be secretary of state but accepted the Langley appointment and ultimately decided he had the best job in Washington.
There was only one large problem, at first. That was poor speaking ability, which might not impress senators at a confirmation hearing. Casey could be well prepared for testimony, but that turned out to be the least of his difficulties. One irregularity after another emerged during the confirmation process, until Casey’s chances appeared threatened.
Among these surprises was a political item from the Reagan-Carter election campaign that brewed into a significant scandal which pundits began calling “Debategate.” Reagan and President Carter had appeared in several televised debates, formatted as joint press conferences, hosted by the League of Women Voters. Before the foreign policy debate a copy of Carter’s briefing book was surreptitiously made and given to the Republicans. Reagan’s staff used the book to prep him for what Carter might say. As Reagan’s campaign manager, Bill Casey had kept the briefing book in his office safe. Several more things called into question Casey’s judgment or integrity. His financial disclosure forms, necessary under post-Watergate laws, were incomplete and had to be amended. It also developed that Casey had not registered as a foreign agent as required by law during periods when he represented the government of Indonesia, and many others as well. Then it became known that he intended to continue managing his stock portfolio, which might create conflicts of interest for a CIA director.
After confirmation, judgment again became an issue in the summer of 1981 in the Hugel affair. This concerned Max Hugel, whom Casey personally brought into the agency as an assistant, then promoted to deputy director for operations. Hugel’s attraction for Casey lay precisely in his lack of association with intelligence. As the CIA director explained to a friend, Gerald P. Carmen, Casey needed to break up the CIA Old Boys network, and only someone from the Outside could do that.
But Hugel did not last long. He resigned after allegations of insider stock transactions. This happened just two months into Hugel’s tenure. Even after the initial disclosures, Bill Casey solidly backed his protégé, saying he had known Hugel as an honest man for twenty years. But once tape recordings surfaced of Hugel giving out business tips, Casey admitted to fewer than two years of more casual acquaintance. Hugel’s legal problems later appeared as overblown allegations by associates, but as far as the CIA was concerned, the damage had been done. The appointment had shaken the clandestine service, which breathed a sigh of relief when the interloper departed.
Had he not had President Reagan’s high regard, Bill Casey would probably have been swept away. As it was, Casey mended the fences he could, listing seventy former clients in financial disclosure statements, asserting he remembered nothing about Debategate, and eventually also agreeing to a blind trust for his stocks. At Langley Casey assembled the top CIA leadership in The Bubble to reassure them. Reagan defended Casey, commenting that the criticisms were merely personal. In August 1981 the Senate intelligence committee passed a recommendation judging “there is no basis for concluding Mr. Casey is unfit to serve” as CIA director.
Casey mollified the professionals with his next DDO. John Henry Stein, the man originally recommended by the transition team, was a forty-eight-year-old officer with two decades at the CIA. Director Casey’s intentions were reflected in his instructions to the new DDO: concentrate on covert paramilitary and political action. Espionage and management could be left to an associate. Casey wanted to stress the critical role the spooks must play in the Reagan universe as well as motivate the best minds to see intelligence as necessary to national security. He anticipated difficulties with congressional overseers but believed these could be circumvented.
Langley did its best to follow the director’s lead. Greater emphasis on recruitment led to a one-third increase in personnel, putting CIA back near its Vietnam-era peak. John Stein saved expertise in covert operations by bringing back eight hundred of the officers let go in the 1970s, most of them on contracts. Although spending for covert operations dropped to just 2 percent of CIA expenses, the base grew since the agency’s budget more than doubled. From 1981 to 1984 the intelligence community’s total allotment increased as much as a quarter. The military contributed to several programs while, by the 1980s, the radios were separately funded. CIA funds did not have to stretch as far.
The CIA under Casey moved into a phase of what enthusiasts saw as combat on Communist territory, fighting revolutionary movements anywhere the Reaganites perceived them as Communist-controlled—which meant almost everywhere. As he would put it in a 1986 speech, the United States had a window of opportunity to advance democracy. To do this, he declared an intent to match Soviet meddling: “Just as there is a classic formula for communist subversion and take-over, there is also a proven method of overthrowing repressive government that can be applied successfully in the Third World.”
With its in-house capabilities plus its privatized or proprietary network, the CIA went to work. Director Casey advocated vigorous covert action. The president declared his support for “freedom fighters” everywhere and defended U.S. covert action. Casey backed operations that were talked down at Langley. John Stein resisted escalation in Nicaragua; John McMahon, Casey’s DDCI after 1982, opposed the wrong kind of effort in Afghanistan, certain Libya plans, and renewed support for UNITA in Angola. For the most part Bill Casey got his way. By 1986, fueled especially by Afghanistan, the CIA’s budget for covert operations surpassed its spending for espionage and clandestine collection for the first time in history.
Within the executive branch President Reagan worked to improve the climate for covert action. Reagan reestablished the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which Carter had abolished, appointing conservatives who encouraged activism. Leo Cherne, a longtime Casey associate, who had chaired the PFIAB under Ford and in fact had been instrumental in bringing Casey onto the board at that time, returned as vice chairman. Anne Armstrong became chairwoman. Like Armstrong and Cherne, staff director Randall Fort, though sophisticated, wore his conservative credentials on his sleeve. The president populated his board with mostly like-minded characters, including Clare Booth Luce, Martin Anderson, W. Glenn Campbell, John S. Foster, Jr., Adm. Thomas Moorer, and William French Smith. On this board Henry Kissinger and Alan Greenspan passed for liberals. Only William O. Baker remained from the old cadre of PFIAB experts. He was joined by CIA space maven Albert Wheelon and airline magnate Robert Six.
In this administration the board was highly restricted. When the White House debated where to put PFIAB and how to fund it, the decision was to locate the board in its old offices on the fourth floor of the Old Executive Office Building, but the budget would come from money set aside for unanticipated needs. The Intelligence Oversight Board, with its minuscule $5 million budget, would be more than an order of magnitude ahead of PFIAB. There is no evidence of efforts to play watchdog; the advisers reviewed the great spy cases of the day, the Moscow embassy bugging mess, and disputes over satellite programs, but on covert action there is little trace of PFIAB. To the contrary, specific indications are that Director Casey encouraged President Reagan to purge the PFIAB in late 1985 in order to rid it of figures who questioned agency activities in Nicaragua. About half the board’s twenty-one members were let go in a “streamlining” move, replaced with a fresh crop of conservatives.
Reagan also reorganized the National Security Council to create a National Security Planning Group (NSPG), a more restricted subcommittee of the NSC that included Vice President George Bush, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the DCI, the NSC adviser, and top political aides. Reagan’s deputy secretaries committee, the old 40 Committee or Special Coordinating Committee at the heart of the secret war, was retitled the Crisis Pre-Planning Group (CPPG), then the Policy Coordination Group (PCG), also known as the 208 Committee for the room in the Old Executive Office Building in which it met weekly. The attorney general and OMB director, regular members of Carter’s NSC Special Group, were relegated to occasional invitees.
Langley’s proposals came in options papers passed around at the outset of a meeting and collected at the end. Final decision rested with the NSPG. Here the Reagan administration parted with its predecessors: Eisenhower had participated directly on the Bay of Pigs and the Congo, and Johnson on Cuba, but these had been ad hoc episodes. Under Ronald Reagan the president himself sat on the ultimate covert action decision body for the first time, eliminating the Special Group as a screen. In Reagan’s day many decisions were made right in the Situation Room, at the NSPG table.
Reagan continued regulating intelligence activities by executive order. His version, Executive Order 12333, issued on December 4, 1981, contained a somewhat expanded definition of covert action, which it termed “special activities.” The order reiterated existing prohibitions on assassinations and specifically provided that, except in time of war or by presidential direction, the CIA had full responsibility for “special activities.” While domestic intelligence provisions attracted the bulk of public attention at the time, the order clearly referred to the NSC as “the highest Executive Branch entity that provides review of, guidance for and direction to” special activities.
Under these procedures Reagan had to sign Memoranda of Notification to justify each covert action and in order to authorize it at the policy level. Reagan issued general instructions affecting the CIA’s role that were expressed in National Security Decision Directives (NSDDs), the authorization documents of his administration. These were supplemented by findings or secret annexes, such as in the 1985 Afghan escalation. Reagan approved covert action against Nicaragua in a November 1981 decision directive. About a year later he sanctioned Bill Casey’s activist stance in an NSDD that ordered global covert operations to prevent nations from accepting the “Cuban model” as well as an NSDD that authorized a “public diplomacy” campaign that nevertheless had secret aspects. An important feature of the struggles over intelligence oversight that pitted Reagan against Congress during these years were controversies over the nature of presidential findings.
An uneasy relationship prevailed between the executive and Congress through much of the period. The Hugel affair and Casey’s legal entanglements got the sides off badly. Nevertheless Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who chaired the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, beginning in 1981 tried to protect Casey and minimize the intrusiveness of oversight. The committee supported the CIA in passage of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act in 1982 and in obtaining extra exemptions from the Freedom of Information Act two years later. But Langley took a jaundiced view, according to historian Frank J. Smist, Jr., who concludes that the CIA position (which he attributes to both Casey and Carter-era national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski) viewed the SSCI as compromising sensitive information and according oversight power to people with no expertise. Treatment of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence was similar. The secret war in Nicaragua proved to be a particularly thorny area of dispute. But Bill Casey, confident in the capabilities of his secret warriors, had no qualms.
Proprietaries had long constituted a backbone of CIA covert capability. Under Casey’s leadership they assumed greater importance. As before, aviation companies performed some of the most useful services, but the 1980s brought a great need for entities capable of moving money, currency trading, personnel services, and the quiet acquisition of various kinds of gear. The CIA had them all.
When Langley liquidated Southern Air Transport (SAT), its buyer, Stanley G. Williams, once SAT manager for the agency, initially went in directions CIA abhorred. Williams sold off most of SAT’s assets, leading to contentious litigation. But mutual dependency proved too great—the CIA needed Southern Air, and SAT wanted Langley’s business. Iranian air force contracts had comprised as much as 42 percent of SAT’s work in 1978. The fall of the shah hurt SAT badly. Even with the Iranian deals, SAT posted a loss of $272,928 for that year. The Iranian account disappeared. Williams bailed out, selling Southern Air to lawyer James H. Bastian in 1979. He became its sole proprietor. Bastian had been SAT’s legal counsel during its CIA years.
Southern Air Transport maintained headquarters and operating facilities in Miami and made a slow recovery. Operating revenue in 1982 totaled $9.8 million and profit $628,700. The next year Bastian brought in William G. Langton as president. Langton had previously worked for two other cargo carriers, Flying Tiger and Evergreen International. In 1984 SAT won $9.1 million in contracts from the Pentagon’s Military Airlift Command, a figure that ballooned to $23.4 million a year later, out of total revenues of $38.9 million—60 percent of its business.
Southern Air’s largest private account was as subcontractor to the Anglo-Irish firm IAS-Guernsey, to provide flight services to Marxist Angola. About three hundred flights were made in Angola between June and December of 1984 alone. Business increased further in 1985 after a competing company left Angola following destruction of one of its C-130-type aircraft on the ground in a guerrilla attack. That year SAT flew almost six hundred flights in Angola plus a hundred more from the United States to the Angolan port city of Benguela. At one point the State Department warned Southern Air against carrying Cuban soldiers on its flights, and SAT ceased doing so.
The charter company also worked for the U.S. government. Through 1986 the Military Airlift Command used eight SAT L-100s (civilianized versions of the C-130) daily for shuttles among bases in the United States. With the State Department, SAT had contracts for monthly flights to Havana to service the American Interests Section there, plus an arrangement to deliver humanitarian assistance to Nicaraguan rebels in Honduras.
Southern Air Transport remained strong through the 1980s. Its fleet expanded from three in 1983 to eight Boeing 707s plus 17 L-100s by 1986. At that time SAT employed 540 persons, including 96 pilots. The worst setbacks were two fatal crashes, the first in its history, on October 4, 1986, and April 8, 1987, both of L-100s flying for the Military Airlift Command. By way of comparison, as of 1982 only four private corporations (Standard Oil of California, Tenneco, Rockwell International, and Mobil Oil) possessed air fleets larger than SAT’s.
In 1979 a former Air America chief pilot and hero of Desert One, James Rhyne, started a company called Aero Contractors. Over more than two decades, with a series of interlocking directorates and subsidiaries, it accumulated more than twenty aircraft and a major stake in an airport in Johnston County, North Carolina. Later investigation revealed corporate directors with fictitious names traced to post office boxes in Northern Virginia, Washington, D.C., or Maryland, plus a complex web of corporate cutouts. Research has yet to establish the operational role of Aero Contractors during this early period, though Rhyne advised some of the pilots recruited by private benefactors to work with the contras.
Another possible proprietary, or at least a company that provided services to CIA, worked out of a field at Middletown, Delaware. Summit Aviation specialized in aircraft brokerage and modification. Even former employees were uncertain of its status. During the Nicaraguan revolution of the late 1970s, Summit trained pilots for dictator Anastasio Somoza. In the eighties Summit Aviation was linked to aircraft the CIA used in El Salvador and Honduras, with planes prepared for the rebels fighting for CIA from Honduras, and with aircraft modifications for Southern Air Transport. In 1984 Summit received a grant from the Federal Aviation Administration to improve its airfield, enabling it to work on large multi-engine aircraft.
Caribbean-based St. Lucia Airways owned or leased two Boeing 707s and an L-100. One of its aircraft carried the shah from Egypt to the United States in 1978, the event that catalyzed the Iran hostage crisis. Revelations of secret U.S. arms deals with Iran brought new attention to St. Lucia with disclosure that a Boeing 707 making one of the deliveries bore company markings. St. Lucia denied involvement, but press investigation uncovered additional details. Another St. Lucia plane in fact carried U.S. weapons to Israel for transshipment to Iran. In 1985 an apparent St. Lucia L-100 was destroyed in Angola. The company denied any role in Angola, but its careful statement did not mention Zaire. Between January and April 1986 alone there were four flights from an American military base to an airfield in Zaire identified as a CIA supply point for UNITA rebels. These reportedly used a type of plane that exists solely in U.S. military inventories. Like SAT, St. Lucia did contract air work for the U.S. Military Airlift Command.
In 1984 a Honolulu investment adviser, Ronald Ray Rewald, charged with securities fraud, defended himself with the claim that his company, Bishop, Baldwin, Rewald, Dillingham & Wong, had been working for the CIA. The Rewald case, which may have been spurious, represented only the bare tip of the iceberg in terms of CIA corporate covers. Edwin Wilson’s import-export operations are an example of the kinds of covers used to move arms and equipment, as is Associated Traders Corporation, which the CIA reportedly set up in 1969. Tetra Tech Corporation, brainchild of retired secret warrior James Critchfield, did security-related work in Middle Eastern nations where Critchfield had labored at the agency. During the first Bush administration a major scandal over a rash of bank failures revealed possible links between the CIA and no fewer than twenty-two savings banks, according to the Houston Post. In all these cases the CIA denied any role. Data remains too scanty to treat the issue of corporate covers with the depth it deserves. But the fact remains that, like the movie company CIA created to further operations in Iran during the hostage crisis, activities there and elsewhere depended on the use of these techniques.
The Reagan administration inherited a program, or at least a problem, in Iran. The hostages came home on Inauguration Day, but now there were plenty of expatriate Iranians in touch with the CIA, not least the shah, who wished nothing better than to return to Teheran. Reagan’s behavior was “extremely schizoid,” in the opinion of Iranian Mansur Rafizadeh, a former intelligence officer who worked with the CIA until 1983. Rafizadeh believes that American policymakers decided very early on to throw in their lot with the Ayatollah Khomeini, expecting that Muslim fundamentalism would be the best defense against communism in the Middle East.
Rafizadeh recounts that Bill Casey went to Ronald Reagan in September 1981 with a dual-track program. The president approved a yearlong tryout. The CIA would fund disparate Iranian exile groups while simultaneously the United States would overlook Israeli arms shipments to Khomeini. On both tracks, gathering intelligence became the object. There is no evidence that the CIA itself sold arms to Iran at this stage. On the other hand, Langley proved quite adept at getting information from the exiles by putting them in competition with one another. Langley’s controller was George Cave, fluent in Farsi and former station chief in both Teheran and Saudi Arabia.
Six or seven main exile circles were active, and the CIA developed them all. The German-based group of Adm. Ahmad Madani, commander of the former Imperial Iranian Navy, reportedly received several million dollars but insisted on complete control of its operations. The CIA, regarding Madani as too independent, eased him out. Many of the exiles were too busy squabbling to do much, but in 1982 the CIA reportedly began paying $100,000 a month to the Front for the Liberation of Iran, under Ali Amini in Paris. This included $20,000 to $30,000 for a new “radio,” Radio Liberation (Radio Nejat), which broadcast four hours a day of anti-Khomeini programming from Egypt and became active in October 1982. The shah’s son, Reza Pahlavi, cooperated with the FLI and appeared on an eleven-minute broadcast that overrode two Iranian domestic TV channels on September 5, 1986, probably FLI’s greatest achievement. The CIA evidently provided miniaturized transmission equipment that made the disruption and substitution possible.
At the same time Langley curried favor with Khomeini. In late 1982 a Russian agent in Iran defected to the British, soon to be debriefed by CIA. The Russian spy, Vladimir Kuzichkin, provided data on the Communist Tudeh Party in Iran, including names of organizers. Langley passed the list to the Iranians, who executed most of its members before outlawing the Tudeh on May 4, 1983. According to Rafizadeh, the CIA did the same to some of the exile groups, passing their contacts in Iran to the Khomeini security services. As a result, Rafizadeh reports, more than a thousand persons were arrested or executed.
It is not clear that these diametrically opposed actions represented purposeful execution of a two-track policy. Mansur Rafizadeh believes this was the case, but an administration source saw U.S. actions as “groping through a maze,” a series of actions without a policy.
The incoherence of U.S. policy comes into sharp focus when the question of relations between Washington and Iran is juxtaposed with the Islamic government’s support for terrorists in Lebanon. Shiite Muslim militiamen in Beirut began a campaign of terror against the West, particularly the United States, when in 1983 Reagan abandoned neutrality in Lebanese factional infighting. The Shiite militia had close ties with Teheran; there was no détente with the “Great Satan,” the United States. In a suicide attack on April 18, 1983, fanatics loaded a panel truck with explosives, rammed their way into the heavily defended U.S. embassy in Beirut, and blew it up. At that instant a CIA regional conference was going on inside; among the seventeen dead Americans (of sixty-three overall) were Robert C. Ames, the agency’s national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, the station chief, his wife, and his deputy. Ames’s hand would be found in the Mediterranean a mile offshore, still bearing his wedding ring. The blow energized Langley. The U.S. government began to crack down on arms shipments to Iran in Operation Staunch.
An even more ambitious dual operation, parallel truck bombings of the U.S. Marine and French military compounds in Beirut, followed on October 23, 1983. The toll mounted with 58 French and 241 American Marines dead plus another hundred injured, many grievously. Bombings continued—of the U.S. embassy in Kuwait, an Israeli military headquarters, and, on September 20, 1984, the American embassy in Beirut again, this time with a truck bomb that left 14 more dead. The Shiites also struck directly at the CIA again on March 16, 1984, kidnapping William Buckley, recently arrived station chief in this tough Middle Eastern city. Despite protective measures, the station chief was seized right off the street in Beirut and held by his captors for a year. He became the first of six American hostages taken in Lebanon.
Washington had a vital interest in all the hostages, and the CIA in Buckley even more. The continued captivity of his station chief amounted to an affront to Bill Casey. It was harder still for Clair E. George, now the DDO, himself the station chief in Beirut when two American diplomats were killed there during the Ford years.
Thoughts in Reagan’s White House turned toward getting Khomeini to influence the Lebanese Shiites. An interagency study completed in October 1984 concluded that a new relationship could be forged only by Khomeini’s successors. In April 1985 the NSC adviser learned from a consultant of Iranian interest in buying American weapons. The CIA entered the picture in May when Graham Fuller, Ames’s successor, sent Bill Casey a memo that argued for “a bolder and perhaps riskier policy” on Iran that would at least ensure a greater U.S. voice in unfolding events. Casey sent the Fuller paper, intended for internal circulation, to the White House. But the CIA’s official position, contained in a May 1985 update to the Iran Special National Intelligence Estimate, remained pessimistic: “Improvement of ties to the United States is not currently a policy option.”
Israeli Foreign Ministry official David Kimche approached national security adviser Robert C. McFarlane two months later to ask if the United States might sell weapons to Iran. When McFarlane replied he thought not, the Israeli asked whether Washington would have any objection if Israel sold some of its American weapons, and if Israel could then replenish its stocks from the United States. The Kimche request led to an NSPG meeting at the White House on August 8 which appears to have given the Israelis a go-ahead.
A morass of deals with Iran followed, related both to reopening ties with Teheran and to recovering American hostages in Lebanon. Some used Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar, a man with a shadowy past of dealings with various security services, including Iranian, American, and Israeli. There were two Israeli arms deals, in September and November 1985, and the second time the Israelis bungled their shipment (routing it through Portugal without appropriate clearances) and appealed for U.S. help. This compromised the White House—McFarlane personally intervened with the Portuguese while the CIA had to provide an aircraft through Southern Air Transport.
Deputy Director John McMahon agonized over this use of CIA services without a presidential finding. Meanwhile McFarlane resigned in December, to be replaced by Adm. John M. Poindexter. At Christmastime Langley asked Poindexter for a finding to cover arms activity. Stanley Sporkin, CIA’s top lawyer, wanted the finding to approve the CIA’s November involvement retroactively. The CIA and NSC together drafted a document that Reagan approved on January 17, 1986. The finding contained orders that Congress not be informed and that it be carried out by private citizens as authorized agents of the United States. Such a private individual—Gen. Richard V. Secord—attended a meeting in the White House on January 11. There Secord met the CIA principals.
Through 1986 Secord negotiated deals, organized shipments, and supported the operations in progress. McFarlane, called back to go along on one mission in May, thought he could talk directly to the Iranians. He never did. A divergence developed: U.S. officials assumed that all the hostages would be released while the Iranians had no such idea. Secord’s team spent the summer trying to open a second channel to Teheran, bypassing the Ghorbanifar link, now fully discredited.
A second channel was eventually opened and one further arms transaction arranged, but Ghorbanifar learned of it and struck back by blowing the operation’s cover. The McFarlane visit to Teheran was revealed in a leaflet distributed there, and a few weeks later the story appeared in the Lebanese magazine Al Shiraa. The Iran arms deals, together with events simultaneously occurring in Nicaragua, ignited a firestorm in the United States that threatened the Reagan presidency.
Three hostages were released: the Reverend Benjamin Weir, Father Lawrence Jenco, and David P. Jacobsen. Reagan sold more than two thousand anti-tank missiles to Iran, plus spare parts and HAWK anti-aircraft missiles. But on the streets of Beirut the terrorists grabbed four more Americans plus British mediator Terry Waite. The CIA station chief, poor Bill Buckley, tortured for months to extract information, expired in the summer of 1986, leaving what is reputed to be a four-hundred page debriefing. Langley suffered grievous wounds. Meanwhile the NSC staffer managing the arms sales, Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North, had given the Iranians a sample of intelligence that might be available in a cooperative relationship with the United States.
The CIA strove to rebuild a network in Iran, running its operation through Frankfurt, Germany, where the steady flow of Iranian workers and migrants made it possible to access the expatriates without arousing suspicion. Some hold this to have been strictly an espionage ploy, others claim that the CIA attempted to set up a “stay behind” group to function against the ayatollahs as well as in case of Soviet conquest. A number of Iranians were recruited. As early as 1986 there were warnings that their communications with the agency had been compromised. Stephen W. Richter, the forty-four-year-old DO officer in charge, relied upon secret writing, an older method rather than the latest technology. Teheran had indeed penetrated his scheme. Beginning in 1988 Iranian authorities arrested more than thirty persons it convicted as CIA agents. Richter could do nothing. The Iranians blew the cover on this disaster in April 1989. The worst that happened to Richter was that he got chewed out during a meeting at headquarters.
Angola returned as a covert action during the Reagan years. The United States had been out of that country since the failure of Project Feature, but the Reaganites saw the United States as the patron of anti-Soviet action worldwide, a stance elevated to the “Reagan Doctrine”—and Angola remained frozen in the image of a Soviet satellite. Jonas Savimbi and UNITA had gone on fighting the MPLA with help from South Africa, and Savimbi certainly wanted to get the Americans back on board. He hired a high-powered Washington firm, Black Manafort Stone and Kelly, to do public relations. Despite the opprobrium of working alongside the South Africans, whose internal divisions were even sharper than in the 1970s, the Reaganites could not resist the lure. President Reagan told an NSPG meeting on November 12, 1985, “We want Savimbi to know the cavalry is coming.” The main difficulty was a dispute between the administration and the intelligence committees over whether U.S. assistance ought to be covert or given openly, with Congress favoring the latter.
In early 1986 Savimbi made a highly publicized visit to the United States. The initial covert program provided $10 to $15 million, and UNITA received fifty Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. The materiel moved through an airfield at Kamina in southeastern Zaire, forwarded on CIA proprietary aircraft. Weapons shipments began in March 1986. In May the IAS-Guernsey company, managing flights by CIA proprietaries, protested that UNITA had fired on and damaged one of its C-130 aircraft. A couple of months later a delegation of Senate intelligence committee staff people visited, conferring with the CIA station chiefs in Zaire and South Africa. In December 1986 the MPLA announced that its forces had captured Stinger missiles from Savimbi’s rebels.
The UNITA forces, spurred by renewed CIA aid, fought on. As early as 1984 Chester Crocker, the State Department’s assistant secretary for Africa, by dint of talking to all interested parties, had begun a move toward a negotiated settlement to include a Cuban withdrawal, but Savimbi resisted a settlement. The CIA project to help him extended past the Reagan administration. Project budgets rose to about $50 million. Robert Gates claims that Secretary of State George Shultz supported the Angolan covert operation as a means of keeping the pressure on the Angolan (MPLA) government to come to agreement. Shultz himself writes that the CIA effectively posed an obstacle to settlement. In December 1988 the parties reached a pact that featured Cuban withdrawal, eventually completed in 1991. By that point a hundred thousand Angolans are believed to have died.
Among the other projects Reagan’s secret warriors carried out, one of the least savory has to have been the project in Cambodia. This supposedly assisted only the non-Communist opposition, a tiny faction allied with the Khmer Rouge monster Pol Pot, with nonlethal aid sent through Thailand. In fact the play amounted to a shell game. Money given the non-Communist resistance eased the situation of the Khmer Rouge while simplifying China’s problems as it backed Pol Pot. Initially only small amounts were involved, starting at $5 million and rising by only about half, though one account has Casey contemplating up to $12 million at a later stage, not far from initial funding for the Nicaragua project, after careful budget combing by CIA comptroller Daniel Childs. Media accounts put the Cambodia fund as high as $24 million. But little opposition existed in Cambodia. War had begun in 1978 when the Vietnamese invaded the country, outraged that the Khmer Rouge were massacring ethnic Vietnamese. The Cambodian resistance was attractive to the Reagan administration merely because it fought a Vietnamese-backed dictatorship. This project effectively put the United States in league with Pol Pot and Communist China, fueling the efforts of a political movement that had slaughtered two million of Cambodia’s citizens. It did nothing for America’s reputation as a bulwark of democracy.
Agency officer William Daugherty, who held a position in Langley’s machinery for covert operations planning and approval after Iran and counterterror operations, writes that CIA officers and U.S. diplomats were all antagonistic to the Cambodia project. Cancellation followed. Robert Gates comments that Casey never warmed to the operation, that it remained a child of Shultz’s State Department. Shultz says nothing of Cambodia at all. Small wonder.
Projects planned for Suriname and Mauritius were canceled because of administration or congressional opposition or blown cover, but there were plenty of others. Shultz shot down Suriname, where in 1983 Casey wanted to insert a couple of hundred Korean commandos to overthrow the dictator. That Langley could not find local recruits said everything. More than fifty covert operations were reportedly in progress by 1984, half in Central or South America, including both paramilitary action and espionage. This represented a 500 percent increase over the final year of the Carter administration. John McMahon’s decision to retire in February 1986 came when the Crisis Pre-Planning Group approved the simultaneous escalation of four covert operations, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Angola, and Cambodia.
Europe would not be ignored on Casey’s watch either. Among the more lurid tales is that the CIA took advantage of the Soviet appetite for American technology by doctoring computers destined to control flows on a Russian natural gas pipeline, causing immense fires. Little evidence has emerged to back this story. More prosaic—and more effective—was the agency’s effort to flood the Soviet Union with prohibited literature, especially miniature copies of the Bible and the dissident writings known as samizdat. French spy chieftain Alexandre de Marenches has taken credit for convincing Director Casey to move on this project, and the French certainly helped circulate the material. But Casey needed no encouragement, and Reagan backed him enthusiastically.
The CIA waged a similar campaign in Eastern Europe, especially Poland, the impetus following from the Soviet quasi-intervention there, the Polish imposition of martial law in December 1981, and the subsequent crackdown on the labor movement Solidarity. The AFL-CIO carried on a parallel effort directly with the union. The Catholic church also retained great influence in Catholic Poland, its efforts enhanced after Reagan’s June 1982 meeting with Pope John Paul II, previously a Polish cardinal. That summer national security adviser William Clark called for options. Zbigniew Brzezinski, of Polish descent and expert in this matter, consulted with Casey on Poland and Eastern Europe more generally. The initiatives amounted to classic CIA political action. Langley’s expenditures went for funding Solidarity, publishing texts, and printing presses and paper smuggled to assorted dissident groups, plus instructions and training where necessary.
Stimulated by the Reaganites, Radio Free Europe also had an important part to play. The old CIA radio had responded to the era of détente with visions of cutting back, changing its name, ending links to dissident networks, perhaps relocating its offices to the United States. Then the KGB masterminded a bombing of RFE headquarters in Munich. Its board wanted to use operating funds to make repairs. The Reagan White House saw an opportunity to energize the entire operation. John Lenczowski, Soviet specialist on the NSC staff, spearheaded the effort, proposing a $2.6 billion program to revamp RFE and scale up its activities. Everyone opposed him—the CIA, State, even the RFE board of directors. Finally he got the State Department to break with the pack—State’s staffer for RFE recalls that senior officers, concerned with NSC’s blocking of their negotiation efforts, decided to let Lenczowski have this victory so they could get on with their real work. The RFE program became part of the public diplomacy initiative President Reagan approved in 1982. Radio Free Europe broadcast freedom right through the decade, contributing its piece to the fall of the Iron Curtain.
By the time Casey’s watch ended, the CIA’s propaganda and political action staff had become quite active indeed. Besides its own projects, the CIA lent specialists out to the NSC and State Department units engaged in public diplomacy, especially for Latin America, and CIA money financed many of their efforts. But the staff had to depend on officers brought back from retirement. The unit’s own senior staff numbered only a few dozen, among them just a handful of DO professionals, the rest being translators or analysts drafted from their normal work. As with the military’s view of “combat arms” billets versus support roles, propaganda at the CIA carried less prestige than covert operations or intelligence gathering.
There can be no doubt of the popularity of covert action in Ronald Reagan’s administration. By some lights Reagan exceeded even Dwight Eisenhower in his use of the technique. And Bill Casey was the instigator, constantly demanding fresh initiatives, taking odd suggestions and turning them into projects, encouraging the DO to be all it could be. All of this aimed at the Russians or Cubans, supposedly, except that so many Reagan secret wars targeted leftist governments more generally. No democracies resulted from any of the Third World operations. Projects in Europe can be judged successful except that the impact of CIA political action remains indeterminate. In Russia, where democracy has yet to become fully established, the CIA helped sharpen Soviet problems, but its contribution seems small. The structural weaknesses of communism and the cultural penetration of Western music and thought loom much larger in the end of the Soviet bloc. Broadly notable, however, is that political action seems to have been more effective than paramilitary interventions.